Speaker

Pedro Teixeira

Knox College

Mathematics

pteixeir@knox.edu

Googling with Math

The effectiveness of web search engine Google can be attributed to a system devised to rank the importance of websites, where the importance of a website is related to the importance of the websites that link to it. In this talk I'll discuss the system used by Google and the mathematics behind it, and in particular how it relates to topics one typically learns in undergraduate courses. We'll see how Google's ranking system leads to what has been called "the world's largest matrix calculation," and examine the techniques used to handle such a monstrous computation.